Robot recruiters

THE problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. In the case of hiring American workers who toil by the hour, number-crunching has uncovered some surprising correlations.

For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.

It could just be coincidence, but some analysts think that people who bother to install a new browser may be the sort who take the time to reach informed decisions. Such people should be better employees. Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, pored over nearly 3m data points from more than 30,000 employees to find this nugget.

Some 60% of American workers earn hourly wages. Of these, about half change jobs each year. So firms that employ lots of unskilled workers, such as supermarkets and fast-food chains, have to vet heaps—sometimes millions—of applications every year. Making the process more efficient could yield big payoffs.

Evolv mines mountains of data. If a client operates call centres, for example, Evolv keeps daily tabs on such things as how long each employee takes to answer a customer’s query. It then relates actual performance to traits that were visible during recruitment.

Some insights are counter-intuitive. For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better. Likewise, many HR departments automatically eliminate candidates who have hopped from job to job. But a recent analysis of 100,000 call-centre workers showed that those who had job-hopped in the past were no more likely to quit quickly than those who had not.

Working with Xerox, a maker of printers, Evolv found that one of the best predictors that a customer-service employee will stick with a job is that he lives nearby and can get to work easily. These and other findings helped Xerox cut attrition by a fifth in a pilot programme that has since been extended. It also found that workers who had joined one or two social networks tended to stay in a job for longer. Those who belonged to four or more social networks did not.

There is no point asking jobseekers if they are honest. But surveys can measure honesty indirectly, by asking questions like “How good at computers are you?” and later: “What does control-V do on a word-processing programme?” A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople.

Algorithms and big data are powerful tools. Wisely used, they can help match the right people with the right jobs. But they must be designed and used by humans, so they can go horribly wrong. Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business recalls a case where the software rejected every one of many good applicants for a job because the firm in question had specified that they must have held a particular job title—one that existed at no other company.

From the Economist -Business

By Dennis K. Berman
Marketplace Editor at Wall Street Journal

This is the key line, which has importance for anyone in business today.

Americans increasingly are becoming their own bank tellers, loan officers, insurance adjusters, checkout clerks, restaurant order takers, citrus-crop inspectors and mall concierges.”

The wonders (or perils) of the modern smartphone app mean that work — from the menial to the substantive — can be distributed without regard to time, location, or any other host of barriers. Remember those days when you would have to have a camera in your car to get a photograph of an accident scene? Well, we all have cameras in our cars now. They’re actually in our pockets.

Simply put: Our perception of what it means to be a customer is changing. It’s not just about being served, in the old-fashioned way of the chirpy, white-capped gas-station attendant, but rather being part of a process, in which company and customer take on tasks together.

Customers care less about structure and titles, and more about results, provided there is some real or perceived benefit in the exchange. Consider it a benign jujitsu, using my customer’s energy for my own benefit.

Here is another line from the WSJ story:

First Financial Credit Union, in Chicago, recently added a feature to its app that lets customers sign loan documents via a phone or tablet’s touch screen, eliminating the need to go into a branch to close a loan. Chief Executive Patrick Bassler said the credit union wrote 287 loans in November, the month the feature was introduced. That was more than double the monthly average, and the bank didn’t have to add a single temporary or permanent employee.”

What a bounty, indeed. Can you imagine the cost savings of reducing, say, 25% of your insurance adjusters or waiters? And what if customers also got more accurate orders, or more timely insurance checks in the bargain?

Of course, it’s never that simple. Perhaps an iPad is not as good at selling the $12 cocktail as the warm and welcoming waiter. And maybe customers make crummy workers when the incentives start to decay — I encourage you to read this Buzzfeed story by John Herrman called ”Welcome To Facebook’s Midlife Crisis.”

But the arc of history teaches us that the company-customer pas de deux has only just begun to change. As it begins, it seems worth thinking about three things:

1. How can I use app technology to make things better for my customers first — and my business second?

2. Can I afford not to play in this game? What expectations are my competitors creating?

3. Am I ready to be in the “technology business” — willing to invest to continually adapt their content and platform? (In the faded days of…six months ago, it was easy to design for the iPad only. That’s rapidly changing as alternatives proliferate.)

Dennis K. Berman
Marketplace Editor at Wall Street Journal

Twitter @dkberman

By Alvis Brigis

What if we were able to monetize the information we put on the Internet? A revolution in which people are paid by the networks they use could herald a new economy for the world’s jobless.

Even as technology contributes to the everyday quality of our lives, robots and software are eliminating human jobs at an unprecedented rate, leading to a “great decoupling” of output/wages and jobs/income that’s becoming increasingly problematic. Technology-driven unemployment is getting worse at an accelerating rate. Meanwhile, Gallup’s latest World Poll demonstrates a growing demand for “good jobs” that transcends borders, cultures and languages. In a nutshell, the acceleration of automation-driven unemployment is both likely as well as broadly undesirable.

Gallup Chairman/C.E.O. Jim Clifton blames much widespread social unrest, instability and war on the lack of formal, 30 hour a week jobs, arguing: “If you were to ask me, from all the world polling Gallup has done for more than 75 years, what would fix the world–what would suddenly create worldwide peace, global well-being, and the next extraordinary advancements in human development, I would say the immediate appearance of 1.8 billion jobs–formal jobs. Nothing would change the current state of humankind more.”

So, where on Earth can we find the 1.8 billion (and growing) good jobs that would fix the world?

It turns out some likely solutions have been emerging all around us.

The prosumer role is poised to proliferate and scale.

With the release of the globally popular The Third Wave in 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler presciently predicted a massive shift from industrial to information-driven economy and the blurring of traditional economic roles resulting in a new class of participant he labelled the “prosumer” (producer plus consumer).

We’ve clearly been transitioning to an info-driven economy in which knowledge workers are in high demand. Much of this has been catalysed by new classes of systems like social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, G+), social-driven search (Google, Bing, Siri), citizen science (SETI-Live, Cell Slider) and big data that increasingly harness consumer-generated data while returning value to users in the form of organized information, entertainment, and occasionally cash (Google is paying select users up to $25 in Amazon gift cards to monitor Internet activity, Viggle is paying people for their TV viewing data). The result? An emerging prosumer class.

While today’s prosumer jobs pay little and fall into the informal category, there is reason to believe that they could grow in volume and value–rapidly. As accelerating change enables companies to get better at capturing, storing, transferring, processing and valuing user data, the prosumer role is poised to proliferate and scale.

New interfaces (iWatch, Google Glass, BCIs, Face Time, Kinect, Surface, search engines), sensors (FitBit, smartphones, data recorders in cars, reactive billboard cameras, camera-equipped drones), compression technologies, and faster computer processors are accelerating human-driven input. Social media, search, info-warehousing, banking, research companies and universities are collecting and mining vast amounts of this input. These developments are expanding the market for data that can be more easily applied across industries and converted into money, which in turn is increasing the demand for prosumers that can input, sort and output this data.

But what about the 1.8 billion jobs that people need now? In one sense, they’re already here.

Over the next decade, companies appear ready to pay more users more money for real-time and longitudinal life-streaming, driving, brain, health and genetic data; for product reactions, media reactions, geographic scans, species scans, general behavioural data, and so forth. More informational value will be captured on-the-fly as people socialize, consume media, learn, play games, navigate the world, or even sleep. Considering these near-term likelihoods, we can confidently predict that data-driven, prosumer-centric capitalism will steadily augment or even grab market share from the traditional 9-to-5, single-role, industrial economy.

A more extreme version of this scenario is that this transformation of capital flow and economics, something that Toffler explores in detail in Revolutionary Wealth, could become an outright boom. Billions of formally unemployed or underemployed humans could prove necessary for the rapid development of new technologies spanning medicine, entertainment, transportation, farming, warfare, search and artificial intelligence.

My confidence in this trend is bolstered by a macro trend: the observation that the billions of people on Earth have and will continue to find it in their interests to centralize information into an “Everything Map” (which Google is already consciously building), a much needed social tool and critical central component of accelerating change.

But what about the 1.8 billion jobs that people need now? In one sense, they’re already here. Facebook’s 1.1 billion users, YouTube’s 1 billion monthly users, Google’s 1 billion monthly users, all exchange their data for access to structured content. Baidu, Bing, Twitter and Yahoo together boast a formidable prosumer base of 2 to 3 billion. Though these systems currently offer prosumers little in value, Google’s Screenwise initiative, which pays some users up to $25 in Amazon Gift Cards, is an important early signal of a looming shift.

We could see an all-out war for prosumers in which more and more value is returned to users.

A Google user is estimated to bring the company about $43 in annual revenue per user (ARPU), a small but steadily growing figure. As Google and other prosumer-based companies increase both total revenue and ARPU, it will make business sense to attract and retain users by paying them a cut, thus keeping participants happy and establishing a sort of Prosumer Equilibrium.

Prosumers and their content will go “where [they] are wanted and stay where [they] are well treated”, as banking master Walter Wriston observed about various forms of capital. The result could be an all-out war for prosumers in which more and more value is returned to users.

At first the money shared with prosumers will be a trickle. I can imagine $100 per prosumer per network by 2018. But as extraordinary, revolutionary wealth is generated, as convergent accelerating change suggests, those numbers could grow quickly, perhaps exponentially. In 10 years, the relentless expansion of info-driven networks could provide billions of prosumers access to a variety of income flows that, when cobbled together, could equate to the formal jobs Jim Clifton says the world needs now. It’s a scenario worth contemplating.

In the meantime, tech-driven unemployment, inflation, and population growth are likely to exacerbate our present-day problems before the same technology comes to the rescue. The world will have to negotiate ongoing instability, conflict and economic shocks as it waits for prosumer pay flows to manifest and grow. We may well be on the cusp of one of the most stressful, and most transformative, decades in human history. One thing we can be absolutely sure of: there will be growing pains.

ALVIS BRIGIS

Alvis Brigis is a media specialist and futurist residing in Los Angeles.

By Nina Hendy

Research by accounting software firm MYOB has found the revenue of small businesses that allow their staff to telework was more likely to have risen in the last year than businesses that don’t allow teleworking.

According to the research small businesses whose employees worked remotely most or all of the time were 24 per cent more likely to have had a revenue rise in the past year. Twenty-one per cent of firms that allow teleworking had a lift in revenue over the last 12 months, compared to 17 per cent of businesses whose staff work only in the office.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/research-shows-teleworking-has-revenue-benefits-20130404-2h7uh.html#ixzz2PXZTpNQh

By Asher Moses

With Yahoo and Google sledging teleworking as slow and detrimental to work quality and creativity, has working from home lost its lustre?

Yahoo’s head of human resources Jackie Reses sent out a memo telling remote staff they must be working in the office by June and if they had an issue they could quit.

Is this the end to what Deloitte said would be one of the biggest structural changes to the Australian labour market this decade?

Not so fast, say experts including Dr Yvette Blount, research co-ordinator at Macquarie University’s Australia Anywhere Working Research Network, who argues that while Silicon Valley innovators may thrive on being together in the office, teleworking in Australia is taking off.

A new Melbourne University study published in the Telecommunications Journal of Australia found people who work from home start earlier, work up to three hours longer and get more done, while they felt more energised, less stressed and had fewer distractions.

Millions of Australians already do some work from home and this number expected to increase with the National Broadband Network (NBN). “There is a lot of telework occurring that is informal that’s not being captured in the official statistics,” said Dr Blount.

However it is clear that teleworking isn’t for everyone, including, ironically, some of the very companies building the online email, instant messaging, office productivity and other tools that enable us to work from anywhere.

“Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices,” said Reses in the Yahoo memo.

“Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

BusinessInsider quoted a source saying Yahoo had many people working exclusively from home who were not productive. Google’s chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, said “as few as possible” Google staff worked from home because it was not as conducive to collaboration and creating “magical moments”.

But Tim Fawcett, general manager of government affairs and policy at Cisco Australia, a key promoter of teleworking, said these companies were swimming against the tide. Around 90 per cent of Cisco’s 75,000 global workforce telework at least one day a week, with 40 per cent classified as “mobile workers”.

“Our workers who work outside the office are consistently more engaged, more productive happier [and] have a higher sense of well being than traditional bricks and mortar workers,” said Fawcett.

In the latest teleworking statistics available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as at November 2008, about a quarter of Australian workers – or 2.4 million people – worked at least some hours at home of which 32 per cent worked only or mainly at home. The number of teleworking hours increased with age.

However, the number of workers who have a formal teleworking arrangement is thought to be much closer to 6 per cent. The federal government aims to have at least 12 per cent of employees teleworking one day a week by 2020 (a target the federal public service has adopted itself), and teleworking has been pushed heavily by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

The NBN is being touted as a game-changer for teleworkers and, according to Senator Conroy, will “potentially revolutionise how we will work”.

Deloitte has said teleworking will deliver nationally an extra $3.2 billion a year to the gross domestic product by 2020-21, the equivalent of 25,000 full-time jobs. In a report released late last year it called teleworking “one of the biggest structural changes to the labour market this decade”.

Dr Blount said telecommuting was not a one-size-fits-all solution and in each case a business case needed to be made.

Her research has found that in some instances team members and managers felt reluctant to “bother” teleworkers at home which could hinder collaboration, while at the same time the teleworkers themselves reported being far more productive and satisfied. Some however experienced “social and professional isolation”.

“One of the things that Google and Yahoo are aware of is they want to create a certain culture in their organisations and it’s really difficult to do that if people aren’t physically there,” said Dr Blount.

Teleworkers also reported working longer hours to justify the privilege of working from home. Dr Blount said this raised the question of whether teleworkers were more productive or just working harder, however more research was sorely needed.

She said a key question her research would be asking was, “we’ve been talking about this since the 1970s so why isn’t it [teleworking] business as usual?”.

NBN Co chief Mike Quigley said he had previously employed software developers who worked from home and were “immensely productive”, in some cases 10 or 20 times more productive than average.

“There’s some jobs that don’t lend themselves to teleworking but there’s a lot of jobs that do”, said Quigley, adding many workers mixed it up spending some time at home and some time at work. While that flexibility was “pretty powerful” there had to be a level of trust between the employee and employer.

He could not say how many NBN Co workers worked from home but a formal policy was in place so that “if somebody is going to telework somebody from our HR department goes out, has a look at where they’re going to be working from” to see whether the appropriate conditions were in place.

- with Ben Grubb

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/telecommuting–the-future-aint-what-it-used-to-be-20130225-2f10u.html#ixzz2NTIWXJXo

By Stevie Clapton

There are several factors that contribute to the running of an effective call center. People, technology and the process of serving customers are all important.  People make up the largest part of the running of a call center and a high turnover can cost you money. In order to decrease the turnover rate there are things you can do to keep your employees content in their job.

Accept Employee Ideas

Employees like to feel like they are a part of the company they work for.  One way to foster that relationship between the employee and the company is to hold team meetings and accept ideas from the employees.  Your employees know your customer best and many will have great ideas on how to better serve them.  Allowing them to share their ideas and even using some of them in your day-to-day operation can keep more employees from looking elsewhere for employment.

Build Teamwork

Just as your employees like to feel like they are a part of the company they work for, they also like to feel like they are part of a team.   Holding special days or celebrations for accomplishments can help bring employees together.  Allowing them to work on projects or training in groups can create friendships within the office.  When employees like who they work for and who they work with, are content employees.

Benefits and Insurance

Most employees have families to support and employee benefits are very important in today’s economy.  Employees are looking for companies that not only pay well but offer benefits such as healthcare, retirement plans and paid time off.  Employees that do not have health benefits and  paid time off are more likely to come to work sick.  A sick employee can spread the illness to other employees which can lower the productivity of your company, paid time off encourages those  who are sick to stay home until they are not contagious.

Another less thought of form of insurance is liability insurance. This insurance will protect your company and your employees.  There are  two types of liability insurance that call centers should have; regular  liability insurance will cover things such as injuries on the job and  error and omission insurance will cover your company in the event an  employee is accused of providing false information on a call.  Both  forms are important to your company and your employee because they  decrease the stress related to their job.  Everyone makes mistakes no  matter how good they are at their job.

Compensation and Promotion

One of the best ways to keep your employees happy in their job is to be  sure to pay them accordingly.  If you pay your employees less that other  companies pay for the same position, it is likely that your employee  will start looking elsewhere.  If you already pay the industry standard  rate of pay, you can also use promotions to keep them motivated.  Keep  in mind a promotion must come with a pay raise for it to be effective.  A  promotion will not only motivate one person but the entire office.  All  employees want to move up in the company and have the chance at making  more money.

By keeping your employees satisfied with their job, you will be  satisfied with your employees.  They won’t be out looking for a new job  and you won’t be facing a high turnover.  You may be paying your  employees more per hour but you won’t be spending as much hiring and  training new people to do the job.

By Allison Mathiebe

It’s frequently the case that there are differences in performance between permanent and temporary staff, but there may also be a big divide between the two.

Alison Mathiebe looks at the practical steps that you can take to overcome this divide.

Temporary agents are often effectively employed in call centres to handle simple transactions and call peaks, or to run short-term campaigns. Call centres may also consider employing temporary agents on a longer-term basis in order to avoid a commitment to increasing or replacing permanent staff. In this case, the employer needs to be aware of staff resentment issues which can emerge when the same duties are performed by both temporary and permanent staff on a long-term basis, and how to prevent and resolve these problems.

Once temporary staff are fully trained and have sufficient experience, a performance division can occur between the temporary and permanent agent groups. In particular, where permanent staff are burnt out and no longer find the work challenging or interesting, they can be outperformed by newer temporary staff wanting to prove their capabilities so they can be kept on for more work.

At the same time, temporary staff can resent being paid less for the same work and being strung along with hopes of permanent work which may never materialise.

Despite ongoing positive feedback, temporary staff may feel that their good work is unrecognised because they haven’t been awarded a permanent role, when the reality may just be that these roles are rare because of the organisation’s hiring restrictions and there is a lot of competition when a permanent position becomes available.

When performance levels between temporary and permanent staffing groups become obvious to everyone in the team or centre (e.g. call taking or quality scores are consistently higher amongst the temporary staff) this can cause deep divisions within the team. Long-term permanent agents can resent the positive attention received by the outperforming temporary staff.  As a result, there may also be objections to reward and recognition schemes which publicly reward the best agents and, by default, reveal which staff are never or rarely rewarded.

Permanent staff may believe that their permanent status and long period of service for the organisation makes them superior to ‘the temps’, even when job descriptions and duties are the same. In some sense, this is correct as permanent staff will be treated more favourably in times of cutbacks; however, this feeling of superiority can set up a situation for bullying if left unchecked.

In addition, where there is a performance division between temporary and permanent staff, the call centre’s service provision will be more seriously affected if the higher-performing temporary agents are automatically let go at a time of staff cutbacks.

While these issues are usually caused by the organisation’s HR policies (such as a freeze on hiring permanent staff and/or a performance management system which doesn’t have strict consequences for consistent underperformers), the call centre manager can do a number of things to prevent and resolve any such problems:

• Where possible, differentiate the duties of permanent and temporary staff.
• Set expectations at the time of employment so that temporary staff has an accurate picture of how long their tenure will be, the likelihood of contracts being renewed and other opportunities within the organisation becoming available.
• Continue to call coach and performance manage all staff to encourage continuous improvement, goal setting and career planning.
• Encourage long-term staff to apply for internal vacancies including any parent/subsidiary company or wider government department opportunities.
• Unless there are clear ‘temp to perm’ guidelines in place, let temporary staff know where they can see the call centre’s and organisation’s vacancies and how they can apply. Do let them know that to be in contention for a permanent role they have to apply rather than receiving the job out of the blue as a reward for good work.
• Organise work placements where call centre staff can do buddy/shadow work in other sections of the organisation for a limited time during low call periods.  This is an opportunity for agents to increase their skills and creates awareness of what other work they may like to apply for in the future.
• Encourage career planning for all – good temporary staff to permanent roles, long-term permanent staff to other opportunities within the organisation, and succession planning within the centre such as training possible future team leaders.  While this may be detrimental to the call centre’s attrition rates (and even service level temporarily) it is better than an unmotivated workforce who see no future opportunities and therefore no need to improve their performance.

Alison Mathiebe is the author of How to Survive (& Thrive) in a Call Centre, available from amazon.co.uk

“Give it the ol’ college try.”

We’ve all heard it. Whether from a coach, a parent or other authority figure, the phrase is often used as encouragement when one is faced with a seemingly insurmountable task. It instructs us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and do our best, even in the face of possible, or even likely, defeat. Lately, the phrase seems all too apt as post-secondary students worldwide are dropping out of school at alarming rates. In fact, a recent study found that one in four freshman in the U.S. does not complete their first year of school, despite giving college a try.

It’s possible that high school students simply do not have a realistic idea of what college is actually like. Although 80% of students graduating high school think they are ready for college once they have their diplomas, the reality does not reflect this confidence. If students base their visions of college on the pop culture representation in movies like Van Wilder or Old School, they are in for a shock when their first week of classes results in the expectation that they will complete two personal essays, an analysis of the role abolitionists played in the Civil War and 140 pages of background reading over the weekend. Highly motivated individuals are able to navigate the initial adjustment to college by tweaking their study habits. But many are not up to this challenge. This is not solely an American phenomenon, either; studies suggest that up to half of all college students drop out of college for various reasons before earning a degree. To put it in perspective, China has a 55.8 percent attainment rate, which measures the percentage of students who complete their degrees, compared to Japan’s 53.7 percent; New Zealand’s 47.3 percent; Ireland’s 43.9 percent; and America’s 40 percent.

Of course, it’s possible that many of these students simply don’t see the point of staying in college. With a record 50 percent of young adults unemployed or underemployed (meaning they either have part-time jobs or jobs for which they are overqualified), more American college graduates are living at home with their parents after school than at any time since 1950.

However, despite such discouraging job statistics, it would be unfair to blame the job market for the ill preparedness displayed by many high school graduates. Consider the following:

- At the time of graduation, nine in ten American high school graduates cannot identify Afghanistan on a map of Asia

- Three in ten cannot find China—the biggest country in the world—on a globe

- Roughly half cannot find New York State on a U.S. map

As a result of these and other findings, more than 2.2 million college freshman must take remedial courses that teach high school material during their first year in college in order to catch up with their peers. Taxpayers shell out $5.6 billion for these remedial courses. To put that figure into perspective, if differently allocated, that money could pay for 175,000 students to attend four years of college.

High school achievement aside, some people argue that the point of college is for students to expand their social and mental horizons rather than to scale new academic heights. Still, while strong arguments can be made for the value of experience over formal education, the bachelor’s degree has become the new high school diploma in many professional circles. Even if students don’t end up pursuing a career in the same field as their major, completing a degree signals to prospective employers that students are hard workers who can finish their commitments.

Students who are currently struggling with school should know that there are many resources available, from reaching out to on-campus advisors, joining study groups and taking advantage of technology to help them study more efficiently through online classes. College is hard work, despite its sometimes-hazy portrayal in pop culture. But it doesn’t have to be impossible, provided students prepare themselves socially and academically for the challenge.

Read more: http://www.collegeathome.com/blog/2013/01/17/unprepared-for-college/

By Chris Johnson

Australia’s Prime Minister Gillard to enable more to join the workforce

In a speech delivered via video link at a telework conference, Julia Gillard will demonstrate the government’s commitment to enabling 12 per cent of federal public servants to work from home by 2020.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will use additional data in the Deloitte research today to support her commitment to have 12 per cent of the Australian Public Service regularly working from home using high-speed broadband by 2020.

The current level of the APS involved in what is known as ”teleworking” is about 4 per cent.

Teleworking is underpinned by the rollout of the national broadband network and involves working at home one or more days a week using such technology to connect with colleagues and clients.

”Harnessing the benefits of new technology and work patterns will be important for Australia if we are to embrace the opportunities of the Asian century,” Ms. Gillard said.

”That’s why the government is building the NBN and why we want to engage with employers and employees to inform them of the possibilities of telework.

”To drive this, the government will show leadership and commit to a goal of having 12 per cent of the APS regularly teleworking by 2020.

”This will be informed by trials of some government agencies, which will commence next year.”

The Prime Minister will make the announcement via video link from Parliament House into the Telework Congress being held at Melbourne University.

She will launch National Telework Week, and after her presentation will take part in a video link question and answer session.

The Deloitte research suggests teleworking will deliver nationally an extra $3.2 billion a year to the gross domestic product by 2020-21, which will be the equivalent of 25,000 full-time jobs.

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/it-pro/government-it/public-service-teleworking-target-of-12-20121111-296sb.html#ixzz2ByjltIpj

By Martin Conboy

The hard lessons learned by Australian call centres in the last century have not carried across to call centre and BPO environments in Asia.

Staff turnover is a major challenge and no matter which way you dress it up, working in a contact centre environment is not for everyone. There are two types of people that work in a contact centre: one is stress hardy and the other is not.

People who are stress hardy are resilient and are less inclined to leave, whereas people who respond poorly to stress tend to leave as soon as they can. What some owners/managers of offshore BPO contact centres fail to realise is that their most is important assets are people. A new project comes in and they think that they just need to get people on the phones, and by and large anybody will do so long as they can speak reasonable English and navigate their way around a computer program. It never occurs to them that they have some of the brightest minds in their society and they are forcing them to do some of the dullest, soul-destroying most stressful work imaginable. Contrary to popular belief, working in a contact centre is not all that it is cracked up to be. I am not suggesting that all BPO work is like that – it’s just to point out that a young mind needs to be taught how do deal with the stress.

With staff turnover rates running at 40 to 60% that’s a massive cost to the industry when one considers the real cost in terms of replacement, recruitment, training, management time and lost productivity until new agents get up to speed.

For many, working in a BPO environment is a means to an end. On top of the stress is racial abuse. Sadly agents who have called into Australia will have experienced this first hand reducing some to tears. I am not saying that all Australians are racist, far from it, but there is an element in our society who think that they have a right to have a crack at overseas agents who are only doing their job. Abuse causes stress and stress drives staff turnover. It’s no wonder that so many resign from the industry.

John Winney blogged on The Sauce website, “So many BPO operators (and some internal centres), see the symptoms of the problems, and seem to think that a productivity/adherence crackdown of some sort is the answer, rather than looking outside of that box and examining the myriad of other contributing factors such as environment, technology, individual personalities and even call demand itself, that all make up the dynamics of a Contact Centre operation.”

He goes on to say, “We need to remind industry management that Call centre agents are as intelligent as they are precious, and that they are being asked to perform one of the most stressful jobs available, in that they are required to be physically tethered to their workspace (even by wireless headset) and then be subjected to having every movement they make measured and monitored.”

Of course a lot of this staff turnover could be addressed by selecting people who are suitable for the industry in the first place rather than the catch as catch can approach by many BPO service providers.

You can have brilliant technology and terrible people and you will not have a good call centre, where as you can have good people and poor technology and your business will survive. It’s a people business; it’s all about people talking with people. Sounds simple; however, it’s amazing how this message gets lost on some.

One of the areas that have been neglected is soft skills training specifically around cross-cultural training. The obvious inference is that if you teach contact centre agents how to better relate to Australians, on a one on one basis the actual job becomes a lot more fun and consequently less stressful.

FooBooonLine.com has developed such a course. They have taken a different approach and produced an outcomes-based programme that is developed and delivered by a teacher as opposed to a trainer whose approach is fundamentally different. The Course is called FACCT (FooBoo Australian Cross Cultural Training) and was developed by Mary Lockley, a tertiary qualified education course designer.

FACCT has been designed for BPO service Providers, who provide Asian based contact centre & back office agent support services, into Australia and at the back of our minds was the notion that agents have to be productive when their initial training is completed. It addresses agents’ soft skills as a function of increasing a BPO Service Providers Net Promoter Score (NPS)

FACCT programme Director Ms. Lockley said, “The teacher has the skills and techniques that not only can impart information to the learner but that more importantly the learner will be able to retain the information.  A trainer will deliver a course but has not been trained themselves in the art of teaching and to know and understand all of the factors that contribute to a learner retaining information.”

She went on to say, “A trainer is someone who provides instruction on a skill or behaviour. For example: a trainer will provide instruction to people about how to use new software or a product range. Another trainer may train people on the correct procedure for handing a complaint. . In other words training is about modifying behaviour.”

“Moreover ‘Teaching’ goes beyond training. Teaching involves understanding the concepts behind the instruction. Teaching asks “Why?” The learner in a teaching environment should be able to make new connections with the material, make assumptions about new situations, and synthesise solutions to problems related to the course material. Someone needs to be  ’taught’ how to interact with Australians — not just trained in Australian idiomatic expressions. In other words teaching is about getting learners to think. That’s the way that adults like to learn.”

In contrast ‘rote’ learning is a memorisation technique based on repetition. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the more one repeats it. It certainly helped me enormously as a adult to know my times table, which was drilled into me as a child, so rote learning has its place, however it is a technique that is best practiced with children.

The FACCT programme is completely Australian. It is not bits of American or British CCT courses. After all Australians are different and unique. The course is a blended combination of face-to-face (Observational) and practical (Experiential) learning and online delivery via a student individualised platform. The course has 6 modules and a culture competent.

Ms. Lockley explained that the course is completely flexible, in that it can be delivered all at once or broken up and interwoven with onboarding and induction customer service and product training.

For existing agents it may be best delivered all at once in a short burst – after all it’s not good to have them off the phones for too long. For new hires it may be best delivered as a part of their induction or on-boarding program and augmented by elements of existing CCT programs – that may stretch out to two weeks of elapsed time over the course of their 7-week induction program. For ‘near’ hires that were close to employment except that they do not have business grade English a different strategy may have to be applied i.e. their course could be supplemented with a program like www.englishlink.com. 

In photo: Jill Goldstein, HR BPO offering lead, Accenture

Jill Goldstein of Accenture looks at workforce data analytics.

For one national consumer goods company, the difference between the performances of its sales regions presented a puzzle for the executive team. They saw a consistent and significant gap between the productivity metrics across the four sales regions – particularly between its highest and lowest performers, in the West and North-East respectively – and needed to know why.

To determine the reasons for the disparity, and to design a plan to remedy the situation, the company turned to its outsourcing provider. While on the surface the workforces in both regions appeared to have the right skill sets for the job and the sales leadership teams were meeting objectives, the service provider used its workforce analytics capabilities to dig deeper.

Drilling into the data on performance ratings revealed that approximately 25% of managers in the North-East region fell below or significantly below expectations, far more than in the West. Further, it was found that exceptions had been made in the hiring process for a high percentage of managers in the North-East, with many lacking the required level of education.

The outsourcing provider next looked at the perception of the support the sales workforce in the two regions received from their managers and found that there was a huge discrepancy, specifically in the areas of communication, executive presence and industry acumen.

Extrapolating this information led the outsourcing provider to make the following recommendations:

• Assess the North-East region’s leadership to ensure their skills match the role;
• Update the enterprise’s recruiting/job profile to match characteristics of higher-performing sales personnel in the West;
• Allow fewer exceptions to hiring criteria; and
• Consider a rotational assignment to infuse skills and model behaviours within the North-East.

This case illustrates how analytics can help an organisation make the workforce changes needed to impact the bottom line.

The challenge

Given the economic climate, some enterprises are finding it a challenge to figure out how best to grow their organisations. They need to move out of the cost-cutting mindset and yet, when going to the HR team for help with these workplace insights, they often find that HR was just as much a victim of the recent downsizing activities as anyone else.

Additionally, while HR management systems contain a wealth of data, many organisations are faced with poor data quality. An underinvestment in the HR IT infrastructure over the years has resulted in data that is incomplete and inconsistent due to numerous sources of information from manual processes. Finally, organisations often have limited access to analytic skills and resources internally.

For these reasons, outsourcing providers are perfectly poised to address these challenges and help organisations add value with analytics. Often sitting on a gold mine of data, outsourcing providers can help move from information to insight in a journey that can identify opportunities for improvement and enable better business outcomes not commonly associated with business process outsourcing (BPO). Spanning from traditional operational efficiency and effectiveness through to workforce performance and productivity, these outcomes can deliver quantified results to the business.

Read more – http://www.personneltoday.com/Articles/17/07/2012/58669/How-outsourcing-providers-can-help-uncover-value-in-workforce-data-through.htm#.UBW54DEe489